Female masturbation is at the heart of Babeland. From the first days of Babeland helping women find the tools to get themselves off has been one of our main goals. We had stickers made that had different terms for female masturbation (whip your cream, polish your pearl...) and handed them out to anny willing taker: customers, people at fairs, the UPS guy. The point was, let's talk about this, lets make it fun, lets share tips, lets encourage each other and laugh a bit. Everybody knows about male masturbation and funny putdowns about it are common in teen movies and so on. But female masturbation is not taken lightly! Oh no. Mostly it is ignored, or (better) it is celebrared, as a women doing it for themselves Rosie the Riveter type thing. Teasing a woman about being a loser because she jerks off a lot would not be funny, it would make gher seem tragic, not doofusy. It would be like teasing someone for a disability or something. NOT FUNNY.

Babeland is in the empowerment school of female madturbation. "You Go Girl!' is our attitude as we sling the vibes and the sex advice. And plenty of women still need the encouragement and advice. I dont think many men need instruction on "how to have your first orgasm." Our coy masturbation slogan stickers still make me smile, but in a weird way i'm looking forward to the time when we tease women about jerking off as much as we do men. When we take it so for granted that women do it and that it doesn't mean they're undesitrable, it just means they're horny.

Anne Friedman's recent article in New York Mag, which I loved, goes through some of the scandals of talking about female masturbation- the Divynyls getting cut off halfway though their song "I touch myself," Cyndy Lauper's "She-Bop' earning the ire of Tipper Gore and her crew. But that outrage has lost it's steam and now most people are resigned to the fact that women have a clitoris (the only part of human anatomy whose sole purpose is pleasure) and they have orgasms, and they will seek those orgasms out, with or without a partner. But we're still not quite laughing about it.